Hoffman: Brother Love leaps from ring to stage

For most of his life — really, since he was 10 — Bruce Prichard was a pro wrestler who made his living delivering punches.

Now he's a stand-up comedian delivering punchlines.

“They're similar, except I don't need to see my chiropractor after doing 20 minutes of comedy,” he said.

Prichard, best known for his money-grubbing, TV-evangelist shyster “Brother Love” character in World Wrestling Entertainment, worked his first stand-up job last week at Dick's Beantown Comedy Club in Worcester, Mass.

“Being a comedian never crossed my mind. Then I got a phone call from somebody looking for a comic to open the show for another wrestler, Mick Foley. Heck, my stories are better than most, so I said yes,” Prichard said.

Prichard wrote 40 pages of jokes, mostly wrestling stories from the road, on a yellow legal pad, and started memorizing them.

“I could tell that was a bad idea. Nobody wants to hear memorized stories. That's too much like school. The whole thing stunk. Then the scary part sunk in. All my life in wrestling, I've pretended to be somebody else. Now I had to be me. I'm the last person I want to be.

“So I took those 40 pages and reduced them to one 3-by-5 card and went on stage. Luckily it was a wrestling crowd. I did my impersonations of Dusty Rhodes and Macho Man Savage. I just winged it. When I heard the audience laugh, it was a total rush. All of a sudden, I was relaxed and had a great time.”

A few years ago, Prichard and I went to an Astros game together. For nine innings he told me the funniest wrestling stories. I could feel people leaning in like those old E.F. Hutton commercials. Like many wrestlers, he is a brilliant natural storyteller. That's what wrestling is — telling stories.

The joke is always on the bad guy.

And nobody was more pure evil than Brother Love. TV evangelists were getting in a lot of trouble around the time Brother Love was raising a ruckus in WWE wrestling rings.

“You mean, like the time the Ultimate Warrior broke my neck in the ring? That's just part of the business,” he laughed.

Prichard said he had known he would be a wrestler since he was 4 years old.

“My mother used to take my brother and me to the matches every Friday night at Sam Houston Coliseum. I lived wrestling. By the time I was 10, I was selling posters and stuff and doing odd jobs for the promoter Paul Boesch. By the time I started attending Dobie High School, I was the general manager for Mr. Boesch's wrestling office. I was the ring announcer. I helped produce the Houston Wrestling television show. I was doing everything I could to learn wrestling. I wanted to be inside that ring or helping to run the show.”

The day after he graduated from Dobie, Prichard left Houston and ran off with the circus that wrestling had become in the early '80s.

“I eventually found myself working for Vince McMahon and the WWE. In 1988, I pitched the Brother Love character to him. I knew that everybody would hate the character, which is every heel wrestler's goal.”

Brother Love was a twist on Dallas-based TV evangelist Robert Tilton. Prichard stuffed himself in a white suit two sizes too small, slicked his hair back and walked unannounced into a McMahon business meeting.

“I slammed my hand on his desk and went into my whole money routine. He loved it. In fact, it was Vince who suggested that I paint my face red,” Prichard said.

For the next 10 years, Prichard traveled the world, telling fans that money could buy happiness, especially if they sent their money to him. Each show ended with Hulk Hogan or Jake the Snake Roberts bouncing Brother Love on his head.

“I loved every second of it. It was like a dream, a blast like you could never imagine. We never worked from a script. We just went out there and winged it. I remember the first time I knew I had latched onto something that worked — I got my first death threat. I know, weird.”

Prichard left WWE earlier this year and, for now, his only bumps and bruises are when jokes bomb.

“We have a bunch of dates coming up and this is something I want to do. It's fun to make people laugh. And I have no shortage of material. I could do five years just on my injuries,” he said.